The Organization Man Read online

  * Here are the percentages of the 339,000 students tested in 1951 who got a passing score of 70 or more: in first place were students majoring in engineering (68 per cent passed); next, those in the physical sciences and mathematics (64 per cent); biological sciences (59 per cent); social sciences (57 per cent); humanities (52 per cent); general arts (48 per cent); business and commerce (42 per cent); agriculture (37 per cent); education (27 per cent). Relative rankings have not materially changed since 1951. The high scores of men majoring in the sciences would seem to indicate that while fewer people are interested in basic science these days, those that are come from the top layer. The mediocre scores of the humanities men—just under the average of 53 per cent for all students—is open to a number of interpretations, but it does seem clear that whatever the causes, the humanities are not attracting a large share of our most gifted people.

  When the humanities are broken down into specific subjects, the prospect is a little more cheerful. In the study of IQ scores for a wide cross section of undergraduates and graduate students, the Commission on Human Resources and Advanced Training found that among students earning Bachelor degrees, men in English and foreign languages did quite well. Going up to the graduate level, humanities majors rank just below those in the natural sciences, just above those in the social sciences. Graduate students of education score abysmally: of the people in the bottom fifth of graduate students in all fields, students working for advanced degrees in education account for 46 per cent. For results of the Army test program see Henry Chauncey, “The Use of the Selective Service College Qualification Test in the Deferment of College Students,” Science, Volume CXVI, No. 3004, July 25, 1952, pages 73-79- Also, Chapter 7, Proceedings of the Conference on the Utilization of Scientific and Professional Manpower, Columbia University Press, 1954. For a résumé of the IQ study done by the Commission on Human Resources and Advanced Training see Dael Wolfle and Toby Oxtoby, “Distribution of Ability of Students Specializing in Different Fields,” Science, September 26, 1952, pages 311-314.

  CHAPTER 8 Business Influence on Education

  In this chapter I would like to bring into sharper focus the part business is playing in these educational changes. Business has been only one of many influences, but it is going to become a great deal more important in the years ahead. Simply by virtue of the changing economics of university financing, the organization man is going to be much more than an alumnus. As overseer of the corporation’s fund giving, he is becoming a sort of extra trustee of education. What he thinks about education, whether we agree with it or not, is a matter of some moment.

  This brings us to an interesting anomaly. Lately, leaders of U.S. business have been complaining that there are nowhere near enough “generalists.” The average management man, they have been declaring, has been far too narrowly educated. One company, the Bell Telephone Company of Pennsylvania, feels so strongly on this it has been detaching some of its most promising middle-management men to the University of Pennsylvania for a year of special study in the humanities. But this, executives concede, is a stopgap measure: it is the kind of education a trainee should have gotten in the first place. Give us the well-rounded man, business leaders are saying to the colleges, the man steeped in fundamentals; we will give him the specialized knowledge he needs.

  Convention after convention they make this plea—and their own recruiters go right on doing what they’ve been doing: demanding more specialists. This does not spring from bad faith. The top man may be perfectly sincere in asking for the man with a broad view—he might even be a liberal arts man himself. Somewhere along the line, however, this gets translated and retranslated by the organization people, so that by the time the company gets down to cases the specifications for its officer candidates are something quite different.

  Nobody knows this better than college placement directors. Every year the order sheet that corporation recruiters bring to the campus has been increasingly loaded against the liberal arts major. Five years ago we checked placement directors of eighty colleges to make up a cumulative listing of the different majors that recruiters were asking for. Out of every hundred jobs offered, it turned out, all but a handful were for men with vocational degrees. “What recruiters want,” as one placement director explained, “goes in this order: (first) specialists, (second) specialists with some liberal education on the side, (third) any college graduate, (fourth) liberal arts graduates.” Most of all, corporations have wanted engineers; they have wanted them so badly that recruiters, normally a friendly lot with one another, have competed for the available supply with every trick in the book.

  Year by year the bias against the liberal arts has deepened. In 1950, to cite one of the most preferred of liberal arts colleges, some sixty-six manufacturing companies reserved interviewing space at Yale. Twenty-eight per cent of these companies at least mentioned that they might have a position for a liberal arts student. The next year, ninety-one manufacturing companies reserved interviewing space, but this time only 16 per cent even mentioned an interest in seeing liberal arts students. In 1952, out of 117 manufacturing companies only 14 per cent indicated interest. In other colleges the same trend was manifest. When we re-queried placement directors in 1953, one half reported that companies were demanding more specialists than before; of the few that reported less demand, several explained that it was only because recruiters were resigned to accepting some liberal arts men as a stopgap. Between 1953 and 1956, the number of business speeches bewailing overspecialization increased. So did the demand for specialists.

  Out of sheer lack of enough candidates for the maw, the recruiters do get around to the liberal arts man these days, but it is only a stopgap measure. Relatively speaking, the liberal arts man remains in the cellar. About the only kind of a job he is seriously considered for at the outset is sales work, and others regard this as a dog job offered people unqualified for anything else. If he still doesn’t get the point, the salary differential should drive it home; with very few exceptions he is offered less money than his classmates who majored in business administration or engineering. (In 1956 the average going rate for engineers has been $394; for students in general, $366.)

  As soon as the mounting enrollment in vocational schools catches up with the demand, it would appear, a good many liberal arts men will be lucky if they can get to see the recruiters at all. For the bias against them seems to be a matter of policy more than current exigency. Frank Endicott, Director of Placement, Northwestern University, asked companies this question: “If a college man really has management potential, will it make any difference in the long run whether he is technically trained or broadly trained in the liberal arts?” 189 companies replied. Only twelve were willing to vote for a liberal arts background. Sixty-six favored technical training and 111 said it wouldn’t make any difference.*

  Won’t it make any difference? My colleagues and I at Fortune had an unusual opportunity to put this professed tolerance to an acid test. A young man walked into our office looking for a job. He was blatantly well-rounded: he had an excellent liberal arts background (he was about to get a Master’s degree in history), a good record of extracurricular work, and he did not lack self-confidence and gregariousness. It was quite obvious that his real interest lay in business rather than in journalism, and he explained to us that the interview was merely a warm-up for the lengthy series he was about to go through with corporations. An idea occurred to us: if he would write down verbatim what happened to him in each interview, we would pay his expenses for two weeks. He jumped at the idea, and together we made up a list of the leading companies in the area, making sure to include the ones whose leaders had been most articulate about the need for liberal arts men.

  He got short shrift. If only, personnel people explained, he had had some technical training. Being a self-assured young man he didn’t let them off without some thorough argument, and this unsettled some interviewers into passing him on up to the next echelon. Here he got a better hearing. Sev
eral executives, he found, thought the liberal arts training wouldn’t hurt him, and two actually offered him a job. In the other twelve cases, however, the response was standard—they just didn’t have any opening for a man with such an unusual educational background.

  Unfortunately, this bias against the humanities is self-proving. Let’s go back for a moment to the “shortage” of engineers. Companies have been downright frenetic in their search for engineers; look at the business pages of the newspapers, and the ads promise everything but the sun to the engineering graduate. But what do they do when they get him? Many companies don’t use the graduates as engineers but as draftsmen. Other companies demand them for every opening in their trainee cadre, and since it wants the best to be executives, it puts them to work studying the nonengineering view of things they didn’t get because the company wanted them to be engineers. Given this kind of attention, they respond, and the company finds its judgment of the Tightness of using engineers confirmed.

  Conceivably, the lack of enough engineers to satiate business could help the liberal arts men. Even in quasi-engineering jobs, some companies have rediscovered, liberal arts men weren’t so bad after all. Several years ago one firm hired thirty-two liberal arts graduates for selling work usually done by engineers; after giving them a cram course in engineering, it found they did as well as regular engineers. The lesson, apparently, has not excited U.S. industry. The liberal arts men who got in under the wire are safe, but engineering-school enrollments are once again swelling and as soon as the new classes come of age, the liberal arts man will be in even less demand than before.

  It is among undergraduates that the business bias against the liberal arts sets up the most far-reaching chain of consequences. When the upperclassman finds at first hand that the recruiters prefer men with the technical specialties, the word gets around the campus very quickly indeed. To the freshmen and sophomores who are pondering a choice of major, this is the real world talking. Why, then, the liberal arts? Sales work, they hear, is about the only slot they would qualify for if they took English or history or politics or such, and they have the strong feeling, not entirely erroneous, that the offer is made only because the recruiters can’t interest the preferred ones in sales. So they listen politely when an occasional alumnus or speaker at a career-counseling meeting speaks glowingly of the liberal arts and the full man, the need for culture, and so on. Then they go sign up for something practical.

  Already this drift has had a considerable effect on the composition of the student body enrolled in the liberal arts. In many cases, the liberal arts group seems divided between a small number of people who wish to teach and write and another group with no clear idea of anything particular they want to do. While roughly 53 per cent of all seniors plan to go into business, only about 29 per cent of the liberal arts men do. At the rate things are going, it would seem, liberal arts is well on its way toward being made into a specialty—a preprofessional training considered useful only for those who intend to lead the gentle life.

  As the college catalogues make obvious, most administrators have been following the if-you-can’t-beat-’em-join-’em line, and in meeting the demand they have lagged but slightly in setting up new courses. In some cases the business demand has also influenced them in the type of man they favor in the selection of students and the awarding of scholarships. One Dean of Freshmen told me that in screening applicants from secondary schools he felt it was only common sense to take into account not only what the college wanted but what, four years later, corporations’ recruiters would want. “They like a pretty gregarious, active type,” he said. “So we find that the best man is the one who’s had an 80 or 85 average in school and plenty of extracurricular activity. We see little use for the ‘brilliant’ introvert who might spend the rest of life turning out essays on obscure portions of D. H. Lawrence’s letters.”

  The influence of business is going to increase, in character as well as degree. Up until recently, business was one of many supporters of education, and its support was diverse—it was an accumulation of gifts by businessmen as individuals. But, business giving is rapidly becoming more institutionalized, more collective. Somebody is going to have to foot the bill for the increased costs of education and, unless the state is to take over, the corporation must assume a much greater share of the burden. Not just as an alumnus, but, ex officio, the organization man is becoming a trustee of education.

  There is nothing inherently wrong with this kind of support—the growing interest in higher education among corporation leaders does not spring from a desire to dominate education but rather from a genuine sense of social obligation. Yet the pitfalls are considerable nonetheless. As long as the businessman was only one of many supporters, it was understandable that he would channel so much of his support to the vocational. Now that he is the agent of a dominant institution rather than an independent donor, he no longer has this justification. Some recognize this; elder statesmen of business like Frank Abrams have repeatedly made the point that what management needs from education is what our whole society needs. Whether the business-school graduates who will one day succeed them will make the same point remains to be seen.

  Yet the crux of the situation may not be so much the pressures of business as the acquiescence of the colleges. The burden is on the educators. They may complain with some justice of Babbitt’s influence, but they help create the stereotype by catering to it. As many people who have sat in on business-academic meetings recognize, it is often the businessmen who seem the philosophers. In contrast, many of the same academics who privately throw up their hands at the horror of our materialistic culture act like so many self-abasing hucksters when it comes to pleasing grant-givers. If they have been so supine in catering to the vocational while there are still some liberal-educated businessmen left around, one can only wonder what their posture will be in the future.

  One solution that everyone seems to be getting enthusiastic about is the formalizing of more “channels of communication” between industry and the colleges. Businessmen have been showing much initiative in this; their organizations have been staging an increasing number of industry-college conferences, and some corporations have been host to groups of professors at special summer seminars. Much of this has been worth while. Where the businessmen have acted in their capacity as laymen they have been discharging an obligation rather than asserting a power, and they have learned much about academic problems thereby. The academic people, similarly, have learned much about business, and this has helped undercut the stereotyped and anachronistic kind of criticism of business so long characteristic of academia.

  Nonetheless I would like to enter a caveat. Of all our problems, the businessman’s complaints about the ivory tower’s lack of esteem for business is one of our least pressing ones. No one should bespeak ignorance of the great changes that have taken place in corporate life, but it is questionable if even uninformed criticism is any more dangerous than a posture of reverence would be. The academic man should never discover himself beholden to business. Between the academic and the business world there must be some conflict of interests, and a running fire of criticism is a cross that business can well afford to put up with. As a dominant force in American society, and prime guardian of orthodox thought, business must stir unease from others, and we would have an unhealthy imbalance of power if it had not, and did not still. Many historians and novelists have been unfair to business, it is true, but it is hard, looking at the way business has managed to thrive, to feel that there was not some logic to the impulse. Would businessmen be better if Babbitt had been less a caricature? Humility may come from within, but an assist from others can help a lot.

  The trouble with many industry-college conferences is that so little gets said. The very nature of such occasions, with their emphases on “communication” and agreement, leads the participants to devote themselves largely to the common denominators that everyone agrees on. This makes for good feeling, but the net effect
is to suppress the real issues. The businessman and the educator may both agree that, say, general education is a good thing and yet have totally differing concepts of what they want. Such debate is in bad odor; the differences are not aired and everyone goes his way with the problem untouched.

  Occasionally people speak out with candor, and then the interchange becomes valuable. Kenneth Brasted, Education Director of the National Association of Manufacturers, performed such a service not so long ago when he addressed the College English Association at Corning, New York. Instead of concealing the NAM’s disapproval of certain aspects of education, he came out frankly with the charge that education is not vocational enough for the needs of his constituents. “Paramount in my mind,” he said, “is the need for higher education to stop purposeful avoidance of any and all vocational or practical training…. You in liberal arts education should urge and encourage your students to pick up some employee skill or tool—e.g., statistics, accounting, mathematics generally; for girls—typing.” One does not have to agree with the point to see how the making of it helps clarify the issues.

  Because the conferences are so often held on business’s home grounds, the academic people are under wraps. No one likes to bite the hand of his host, especially at the time of eating, and thus businessmen are robbed of the kind of comment that could serve them well. It would be instructive for them to hear frank appraisal of the caliber of the textbooks they subsidize for their training courses, or of their version of economic history. They don’t. Occasionally, some academics do revolt; during a conference staged for academics by a large corporation one of the most noted windbags in U.S. business started talking nonsense to his academic guests, at which juncture several pointedly got up and left. Usually, however, academics suffer in silence.*